Delay-Based Network Utility Maximization Modelling for Congestion Control in Named Data Networking

Content replication and name-based routing lead to a natural multi-source and multipath transmission paradigm in NDN. Due to the unique connectionless characteristic of NDN, current end-to-end multipath congestion control schemes (e.g. MPTCP) cannot be used directly on NDN. This paper proposes a Network Utility Maximization (NUM) model to formulate multi-source and multipath transmission in NDN with in-network caches. From this model, a family of receiver-driven transmission solutions can be derived, named as path-specified congestion control. The path-specified congestion control enables content consumers to separate the traffic control on each path, which consequently facilitates fair and efficient bandwidth sharing amongst all consumers. As a specific instance, a Delay-based Path-specified Congestion Control Protocol (DPCCP) is presented, which utilizes queuing delays as signals to measure and control congestion levels of different bottlenecks. In addition, a set of high-performance congestion control laws are designed to accelerate bandwidth and fairness convergence towards the optimum defined by the NUM model. Finally, DPCCP is compared with state-of-the-art solutions. The experimental evaluations show that DPCCP outperforms existing solutions in terms of bandwidth utilization, convergence time and packet loss.